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Part of Poetry Westchester! , bringing free writing workshops, poetry readings and talks to community libraries throughout Westchester--a county rich in literary history, from Edgar Allan Poe to Washington Irving.

Funded by the Westchester Library System (through the Westchester County Board of Legislators).

Who were the Beat Poets? Why are they "beat" and what does that mean? A look at their work, and the decades of the fifties and sixties in which they wrote, will explain why they remain iconic figures in American poetry. Their writing was shocking to some yet celebrated by others. Contemporary reaction to their poems was vociferous and divided. Today they continue to be notorious, though there is growing interest in their lively, noisy, exciting work. The Beat goes on!

Raymond P Scheindlin draws upon the letters and poems of Judah Halevi (1085-1141), the pre-Modern Hebrew poet and philosopher, to recreate the last year of Halevi’s life during which he abandoned his Spanish homeland to journey to the land of Israel. Though Halevi is generally considered the precursor of Zionism, this new reading of his poetry locates his pilgrimage in the sphere of personal piety and calls attention to the influence of Halevi on Islamic religious ideas.

Join Richard Lewis (the founding director of the Touchstone Center) in a poetry and art-making workshop as he explores the magical elements of light and air, accompanied by a performance of Play, Said the Air to the Earth by dancer Clea Rivera and musician Harry Mann.

In the spirit of Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara's collaborative poem-paintings, currently on view in New York Cool, participants representing several generations of New York City poetry respond to the atmosphere of camaraderie among downtown artists and poets from 1955 to the present.

Who were the Beat Poets? Why are they "beat" and what does that mean? A look at their work, and the decades of the fifties and sixties in which they wrote, will explain why they remain iconic figures in American poetry. Their writing was shocking to some yet celebrated by others. Contemporary reaction to their poems was vociferous and divided. Today they continue to be notorious, though there is growing interest in their lively, noisy, exciting work. The Beat goes on!

Coral Bracho and her translator Forrest Gander read from Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems, Bracho's first full-length collection to appear in English. Credited with changing the course of contemporary Mexican poetry with her 1982 collection El ser que va a morir, Bracho remains one of her country's most influential poets.

At each stage of his tumultuous life, Neruda wrote poems as chronicles, explaining his poetry and politics. He also wrote poems about the mysterious power of poetry itself, a power fully embraced in Chilean culture. In his talk Martín Espada will focus on the evolution of Neruda as a political poet, his struggle and exile at the hands of his own government, his triumphant return, his death in the wake of the military coup, and his redemption after democracy returned to Chile.

Looking at Yeats, though the lens of his finished poems, he can seem a historic poet, almost cast in marble. In fact Yeats was a turbulent, troubled young man who became a passionate and sorrowful older one. His love poems show that. His poems of Ireland show it too. His beautiful language, far from being a monument, is a fever chart of the intensity and hunger with which he lived his life. Ireland and a desperate, unrequited love affair drove his poetry, some of which is the greatest of the twentieth century. So did his fear of old age and his fury at the modern world.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, an elfin, red-haired diva of the sonnet, published some of the wisest, sexiest, and most feminist poetry of the 20th century. From her childhood as caretaker of her siblings in Camden, Maine, to her adolescent near-miss at a national prize for "Renascence" which sparked a national poetry controversy, to her bohemian life in one of Greenwich Village's tiniest brownstones, Millay was as uncompromising in her devotion to the rules of verse as she was in her flaunting of social rules.